Intel Kills Kaby Lake-X CPUs

Intel announced that the Kaby Lake-X line of processors had reached end of life, less than a years after the initial launch.

If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice that it says Kaby Lake-X and now just Kaby Lake. Last year, Intel released a more powerful version of the original Kaby Lake, with Core i5-7640X and Core i7-7740X. They were originally designed for people that wanted to extract more from their CPU and get some serious overclocking.

While it might sound like a good idea on paper, in reality, the products were not all that well received by the public. The new CPUs had different voltage requirements, which in turn meant different motherboard versions, and that created a parallel niche that didn’t really help anyone in the end.

End of life will take a while

End of life sounds like a definitive term, but it’s more like a notification. The processors will still be available for order by stores until November 30, 2018, and the manufacturing process is scheduled to end on May 31, 2019.

As you can imagine, this applies to boxed and tray CPUs, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Intel shoot itself in the foot with this version, mostly because soon after Kaby Lake-X was made available, another generation of Intel processors was released, the Coffee Lake iteration.

Why would someone buy a processor that has different voltage requirements, needs different hardware, and it’s quickly outdated by a newer product?

From the looks of it, Intel is trying to shed some of the more unnecessary products out there, and it wouldn’t be completely unexpected to see other processors following the same round. The company is really trying to push a new generation out there door, build on 10nm, and they had to postpone the launch already.